Abstract

For writing and literacies researchers, the opening decades of the twenty-ﬁrst century seem replete with possibilities, as emerging digital technologies facilitate expanded communicative repertoires and multiple forms of participation, collaboration, and civic engagement. These possibilities motivate three key agendas for writing and literacies research that inform this book. The ﬁrst is the rapid and increased role of digital technologies that have become ubiquitous in daily life, in schools, in workplaces, and in every sphere of society. Such transformations have led to a groundswell of literacy research to help education keep pace with the changes to the digital communications environment, to ensure that schooling practices continue to be relevant in a world in which we cannot predict the technologies of tomorrow. Writing and literacy education is not simply an agenda of the pastof basic skills, of narrow curriculum, a means through which governments can create good citizens with functional literacies. Rather, literacies are central to education, to society, to human cognition, to human socialization, cultural identities, power relations, and to the very construction of social space.